Announcement

Robot competitions, including the EU FP7 funded projects RoCKin and euRathlon, and robotics challenges such as EuRoC, are becoming widely accepted as a complementary approach to advance robotics R&D. Competitions stimulate innovation in a compelling way by providing researchers and developers with realistic mock up scenarios to test and compare their robots.

At the same time benchmarking is recognised as a major challenge in robotics – without benchmarks it is impossible to properly compare robot solutions – and several efforts have attempted to define and publish benchmarks (e.g., RawSeeds, BRICS, EURON SIG and IEEE TC on Good Experimental Methodology, Benchmarking, Challenges and Competitions).

This workshop is the fourth of a series on Robot Competitions, following one at IROS 2012, and two at previous European Robotics Fora. This year it includes speakers from euRathlon, RoCKIn and EuRoC, who will report on the outputs competition events held so far within the frameworks of these projects, and a panel of experts that will spark debate with the audience on the impact of robot competitions and challenges in research, technology transfer and education.